Facebook has agreed to pay Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp for its journalism content in Australia, a month after the social media platform temporarily blocked news links inside the country over legislation pressing digital giants to compensate publishers.

The multi-year deal, announced on Tuesday, includes news content from major Murdoch conservative media outlets like The Australian, a national newspaper, and the news site news.com.au, as well as other metropolitan, regional and community publications.

It comes a month after Google unveiled its own three-year global agreement with News Corp to pay for the publisher’s news content, and after Facebook backed down, under heavy criticism, from its drastic step of blocking the sharing or viewing of news links in Australia. Few details, including how much Facebook will pay News Corp for content, were released.

In a statement on Tuesday, Robert Thomson, chief executive of News Corp, said the agreement, which he called a “landmark”, would “have a material and meaningful impact on our Australian news businesses”.

News Corp leaders, Thomson added, had “led a global debate” as the rise of the digital giants had impoverished the news industry. With the deal, he said, Facebook’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, and his team had helped “fashion a future for journalism, which has been under extreme duress”.

New York Times News Service